Boost Your SEO: Duplicate Content

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Sometimes you might have page content that is fairly similar to each other. Is there any harm in keeping identical pages of content? The answer to this is yes. The leading search engines will likely dock your site in search engine rankings.

Search engine crawlers go through the links and pages on your site to check on page content and relavancy. If they find similar content pages they won’t know which is more relevant to your site and to visitors. If other websites are linking to your pages it could hurt your potential in-bound traffic. Also it’s not much fun to make the same changes to two different pages.

Site navigation, header and footer areas, do not count as duplicate content areas. Navigation is an assumed part of the page and search crawlers ignore this information to get to the main content of the page.

You can prevent having duplicate content by examining your sitemap. If the topics of two pages are fairly similar you might want to consider combining the two. It may help to use Siteliner.com to check over your site to find duplicate content. We can also add specific meta tags to your pages to credit one content page as the content source or we can just tell the search engines not to crawl the page.